Twitter Makes Bad TV Awesome

It used to be when you watched something awful, you had to wait to clown it to your friends. At best, you could only talk to one pal at a time. With Twitter, now bad TV is a free-for-all. David Carr of The New York Times writes

Today, the peanut gallery, digitally enabled by social media, is casting real-time shadows onto the screen of popular culture.

As my colleague Brian Stelter wrote in The New York Times recently, the Internet, which was thought to be a TV killer, is turning out to be its wingman, helping build huge, and in some cases record, audiences for large events like the Super Bowl, the Grammys and the Olympics. (How else to explain the baffling ardency for curling?) During the Oscars last week, there were as many as 70,000 posts an hour on Twitter, according to Trendr.

Television, historically an extremely passive way of consuming media, could become something else, a hybrid form of professionally produced content and crowd-sourced comments. Right now, a crawl sometimes shows up at the bottom of the news, but in the not too distant future, it could be your friends’ comments that are streaming by, or a curated feed of commentary from a third party, or algorithmically popular Twitter messages that bubble up in real time.

“I think that television has changed a lot in the last 18 months,” said Robin Sloan, who works in media partnership development at Twitter. “Shows are all in English, but now there is this kind of subtitling going on.”